It has long been a desire of the cosmetic industry to produce a composition for use on human hair which would cleanse the hair and rinse out easily while imparting gloss to the hair without excessive dryness. While it has been relatively easy to produce compositions which will cleanse the hair and rinse out easily, such compositions have been deficient in one or more other areas. Some compositions leave the hair difficult to comb, rough to the hand, lacking luster and/or cause it to become unmanageable when the dry hair is combed due to the static electricity caused by excessive removal of oil from the hair.
Many of these problems are caused by the new synthetic detergents presently used to cleanse hair which not only remove dirt, but also remove a good portion of natural oils and sebum from the hair and scalp, making the hair more difficult to manage. This decreased manageability is first noticed during the actual shampooing by the hair becoming snarled and entangled and, later, after the hair has been towel-dried, when combing is attempted.
A commonly accepted method of overcoming the tangling problem is to treat the shampooed hair with a conditioning composition, after the shampoo has been rinsed from the hair. The conditioning composition will generally coat the hair shafts to reduce tangling, making wet combing easier, providing improved manageability.
The use of a separate conditioning composition after shampooing is inconvenient. Additionally, the use of a separate shampoo and conditioner adds greatly to the cost since each of these items must be packaged separately and since, in many instances, the packaging costs typically exceed the cost of the contents.
One might therefore expect combination of a known hair cleansing agent with a known hair conditioner to provide a simple solution but such combinations are more often unsuited for use on hair for any purpose. It may be possible to predict, in certain instances, whether of not certain types of detergent compositions will perform satisfactorily on human hair. It may also be possible to predict, to some degree, whether or not a particular composition will have a conditioning effect upon the hair. It is virtually impossible, however, to determine whether or not combinations of such ingredients will be compatible, even though they may have been established separately as successful candidates for use on hair. This is especially true since most hair detergents and hair conditioning agents are ionic compositions which quite often interact to form an unsuitable complex, although they may be separately useful.
Prior art conditioning compositions for use after shampooing are generally comprised of cationic resins which can not be used simultaneously with detergent compositions normally employed to cleanse hair because they are generally anionic. This same incompatibility may cause problems even when these compositions are used separately. Unless some anionic shampoos are completely rinsed from the hair (this being virtually impossible), the addition of certain cationic conditioning compositions may cause some adduct precipitation on the hair, imparting an objectionable feel to the hair. As well as this, the presence of this adduct causes increased soiling and oftentimes leaving the hair much softer than desired which may cause premature falling of subsequently applied hair styling.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,816,616 discloses one example of a unitary shampoo and conditioning composition comprised of a particular cationic polymer based upon a repeating substituted anhydroglucose and anionic detergent. Consistent with the discussion above, it is acknowledged in this patent that formulation of such material is extremely difficult because of the tendency for detergents and conditioning compositions to chemically combine and precipitate on the hair and leave an undesirable residue which has an adverse effect upon the hair.